Big Bang Technology

From the looks of things I'm not going to be writing a lot of essays like Max. I'd like to still be active though, so we started Big Bang Developer Diaries. We may not talk specifically about the project we're working on, but at least we're talking. Inspired by Brent Simmons.

We've started to combine all of our strategies for managing instances of Expression Engine into Capistrano recipes. We are already using this in multiple projects and it's starting to become very handy. Expect this to be more fleshed out soon. Feel free to watch the progress on GitHub.

Misko Hevery's guide to writing testable code. I have been following Misko's talks on the Google testing blog for a while now. This is golden.

This is crazy. I really want to try it with my keys.

(Via Jason Kottke.)

Seeing this post just made my day. I LOVE stuff like this.

(Via Shaun Inman.)

For anyone who hasn't heard of Fire Vox, it is a free, open source screen reader extension for Firefox that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Among other things it has support for WAI-ARIA and the CSS3 Speech Module, and is a good alternative to VoiceOver if you're on a Mac and need a screen reader for web browsing (or testing).

(Via 456 Berea Street.)

My brother just started taking part-time computer science classes at the University of Toronto and we've been talking about the stuff he's learning, most of it is beginner python and intro to object oriented programming etc. Looks like this might be a great resource for people like myself who have been programming for years, but don't have a proper science degree.

(Via Tantek)

I'm not sure that I need ANOTHER web browser, and this is just a stop-gap until the real mac version comes out, but good on the crossover folks for releasing this.

(Via Magic)

We've got something new and cool in the works and I'm excited to be able to tell you a little bit about it today!

Before the end of the year we are planning to release a new service for content delivery. This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

This is great news. I've just been involved with a project that used Akamai and I think they will finally have some cheap competition to shake things up.

Today the IE team  is pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer Beta 2 in 21 additional  languages. The languages released today are fully localized versions of the IE8 English Beta 2.

Good for them.

(Via IEBlog.)

We’ve released an updated beta of Adobe AIR for Linux. This includes 1.1 functionality and the encrypted local store, so for those of you having to retype your password into applications on Linux, that should go away.

(Via Ryan Stewart.)

Dion Almaer shares his interesting slides about Google Gears, HTML 5 and the Open Web.

Want to win an all-expense paid trip to any Carsonified event? Check out the Carsonified Golden Ticket post. This seems like a really great idea and should drum up some good press for the many Carsonified events.

I really found this presentation insightful. One thing I didn't know about is Natural Docs which I am definitely going to look into.

(Via beep)

Hilarious. Why should we care about standards anymore when they can't finalize a spec until 2022! How can we speed this up?

So Apple rejects an iPhone app because it competes with functionality in the desktop version of iTunes.

(Via cubicle 17.)

I watched the screencast of this recently. I find this weird. Sproutcore is a javascript framework that uses ruby for generators and easy framework creation. Sprouts is an actionscript project generation and configuration tool. I wonder who thought of the name first?